Development of Bad Mood began in 1995. The initial DView base, programmed entirely in C, was able to render Doom maps, albeit only as flat-shaded surfaces without texture mapping. This initial architecture, which was slow on non-custom hardware, was optimized by the Bad Mood team with addition of assembly routines to accelerate rendering. The last version to use this architecture was released as version 1.32a in November 1995.[1]

DSP programming, additional optimizations, and code for rendering of textures and sprites were added to the engine between 1995 and 1997 [2][3], with significant contributions from Doug Little[4], a prominent developer in the Atari Falcon community[5]. At this point the port still remained a map viewer rather than a fully playable game.

Following the 3.07a release of August 1997, development halted until 2013 due to lack of developer interest and occupation with other projects. This was partially related to the 1997 release of the official Doom source code, reducing interest in development of a custom engine. As demonstrated by the PmDoom source port, however, the results of a direct translation of the official code to the Atari could not produce tolerable performance on all but the most powerful of these machines.

Doug Little returned to Bad Mood development in 2013. He merged the GPL Doom codebase with the existing Bad Mood rendering engine and several additional optimizations to both the gameplay simulation and rendering code, creating a playable game. [6].

An alpha version was released in January 2014 which was the first playable release of Bad Mood. Since then, development has continued[7], and a beta release was presented at the Sillyventure 2014 party on 5-7 December 2014. This beta significantly improves on the alpha release in many ways, but most obviously with support for playing back the ingame music, and improved visual quality thanks to a texture pack and support for effects such as freelook and support for translucent textures (for the Spectre).